On May 21, the CRTC issued Broadcasting Regulatory Policy 2026-96, ordering Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Apple TV+, Spotify, and every other major streaming platform operating in Canada to hand over 15% of their Canadian revenues. The money will be distributed to Canadian content funds, news organizations, French-language production, and Indigenous media through a complex allocation framework that the CRTC alone will administer.

The decision tripled the existing 5% base contribution established in June 2024. For platforms earning over $100 million in Canadian revenue, the CRTC prescribes how the money must be spent: at least 30% on "enhanced partnerships" where a Canadian entity holds majority copyright, and at least 30% on French-language programming — half of which must be original first-run content sourced from enhanced partnerships. The CRTC estimates total annual funding of more than $2 billion.

The same decision reduced obligations for traditional Canadian private broadcasters — Bell, Rogers, Corus — from 30-45% down to 25%. The foreign platforms that actually invest billions in Canadian production got taxed harder. The domestic incumbents that just fired thousands of journalists and closed dozens of radio stations got relief.

Within twenty-four hours, the Motion Picture Association — representing Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery — issued its strongest condemnation of a Canadian regulatory decision in the organization's history. Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin:

The Motion Picture Association strongly condemns the CRTC's decision to impose unprecedented, unnecessary, and discriminatory investment obligations on American streaming services operating in Canada... This decision triples the cost of doing business in Canada and will spark even more inflation in the market, making further investment and innovation less attractive.

The U.S. Ambassador to Canada followed. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce followed. A Congressional bill threatening Section 301 retaliation was already in play. The CUSMA joint review deadline is July 1. And Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller — whose government created the Online Streaming Act — responded by distancing himself from his own regulator, saying he was "reviewing" the decision and "carefully assessing its impacts."

The CRTC picked this fight six weeks before the most consequential trade negotiation in a generation. It tripled a levy that is already being challenged in Federal Court. It did so to protect an industry that has never been more profitable. And the Canadian government is now pretending it had nothing to do with it.

The trade threat is real and immediate

On March 19, 2026, Rep. Lloyd Smucker introduced the "Protecting American Streaming and Innovation Act" in Congress. The bill directs the USTR to launch a Section 301 investigation into Canada's Online Streaming Act within 30 days of enactment, imposes a 180-day compliance window, and then triggers mandatory retaliatory action. The bill extends to other countries with similar frameworks — Australia, Brazil, Israel — and requires quarterly Congressional reports for two years.

USTR Jamieson Greer has already named the Online Streaming Act alongside dairy as a headline trade issue for the CUSMA review. U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra posted that the CRTC decision "is making a bad situation worse" and that "CRTC is targeting and taxing U.S. companies, putting up new, discriminatory trade barriers, and worsening the investment climate for American businesses."

Canada's legal defense invokes the CUSMA cultural exemption — Article 32.6(2), which states the agreement doesn't apply to measures adopted by Canada with respect to cultural industries. This is the argument that has historically shielded CanCon regulations from trade challenges. But CUSMA Article 32.6(4) — the "poison pill" that Canadian negotiators accepted — permits any party to take "a measure of equivalent commercial effect" in response. This retaliation is not limited to the cultural sector. The United States could target dairy, lumber, steel, automotive parts, or any other Canadian export.

The Smucker bill goes further, arguing the cultural exemption covers "traditional publishing, recordings, and broadcasting" — not modern digital streaming services. The argument is that a 1988-era exemption designed for cable television and record stores does not extend to platforms that didn't exist when the exemption was written. If that interpretation prevails, Canada has no shield at all.

This is what the CRTC chose to escalate — on the same week, in the same trade environment, with the same July 1 deadline approaching that threatens every element of Canada's continental trade relationship.

The legal challenge is already underway

The 15% decision landed on top of an unresolved legal challenge to the original 5%.

On July 4, 2024, MPA-Canada, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify filed Federal Court of Appeal challenges against the CRTC's base contribution decision. Their legal arguments: the CRTC exceeded its statutory authority under the amended Broadcasting Act; requiring streaming services to fund local news goes beyond what Parliament intended; streaming services are being forced to subsidize their own competitors; and the levy violates CUSMA trade obligations.

On December 23, 2024, the Federal Court of Appeal granted a stay — the companies do not have to pay the 5% pending resolution of the appeal. The consolidated hearing was held over four days in Toronto in June 2025. As of today, no ruling has been issued. Payments have been set aside in trust.

The CRTC tripled the levy before the court ruled on the legality of the original amount. CRTC Vice-President Scott Shortliffe acknowledged the legal uncertainty but signaled the regulator would proceed regardless: "We do recognize there's a stay in place, but in the meantime we're going forward in establishing these policies."

A regulator that doesn't know whether its initial decision will survive judicial review has now tripled the obligation and dared the courts and the Americans to stop it.

How Canada compares to the world

The CRTC's 15% rate places Canada among the most expensive jurisdictions in the world for streaming services to operate. Only France, which imposes 20-25% through a combination of investment requirements and Centre national du cinéma (CNC) levies, is higher.

Country	Rate	Notes
Canada	15%	5% cash + 10% Canadian Programming Expenditure (CPE); tripled May 2026
France	20-25%	Investment in European/French works + CNC levy
Australia	7.5% of revenue	Took effect January 2026
Spain	~6%
Denmark	5%
Netherlands	5%
Belgium	Up to 9.5%	Constitutional challenge rejected; EU Court referral pending
UK	0% (rejected)	Culture Committee recommended 5%; government rejected July 2025
Most EU members	0.5-6%	Under AVMS Directive

The United Kingdom — Canada's closest cultural and linguistic comparator — explicitly rejected a streaming levy in July 2025. The British government concluded that mandated levies would risk chilling investment in UK production. The UK also imposes zero content quotas on streaming platforms. Its regulatory framework for online content — the Online Safety Act — focuses exclusively on user safety, not cultural nationalism.

The European Union's approach under the Audiovisual Media Services Directive is a 30% European content catalogue requirement — a content availability standard. Not a tax. Platforms must have 30% European content in their libraries and give it prominence. They are not required to hand 15% of revenue to government-administered cultural funds. The distinction matters. Europe tells platforms what to carry. Canada takes their money — and the CRTC took as much as it could.

The problem the CRTC claims to solve does not exist

This is the foundational absurdity. The CRTC tripled a levy to protect Canadian content at the precise moment Canadian content has never been more successful.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has documented this exhaustively using the industry's own data. The Profile 2023 report — the annual benchmark of Canada's film and television production industry — showed record production levels. Record CanCon production. Record French-language production. Canadian film and television production more than doubled over the past decade, driven overwhelmingly by streamer investment.

Netflix alone has spent more than $5 billion on Canadian content production over five years and maintains a team of almost 800 people in Canada. Netflix's spending on Canadian creator partnerships exceeds $30 million — more than it spends on this activity in any other jurisdiction worldwide. These are voluntary investments made because Canada has talent, crews, locations, tax credits, and a competitive production ecosystem.

Spotify's Loud & Clear data tells the story from the music side. Canadian artists rank third in worldwide streams of the top 1,000 singles, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2025, Canadian artists generated CAD $544 million on Spotify alone — up 19% year-over-year. Ninety-two percent of all royalties generated by Canadian artists on Spotify come from listeners outside of Canada.

Ninety-two percent.

The platforms the CRTC is taxing are the platforms that made Canadian artists globally successful. Drake released his early mixtapes independently online. Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. The Weeknd released free mixtapes on YouTube and built a following through the open internet. Celine Dion's global success was driven by international record deals. None of these artists — the biggest cultural exports Canada has ever produced — owed anything to the CRTC or its points system or its radio quotas or its content funds.

Geist's conclusion: "there is no Canadian content emergency and no risk to the viability of film and TV production in Canada."

The CRTC's own data confirms this. The CRTC's 2025 Communications Market Reports shows that revenues from traditional broadcasting are declining while online streaming revenues grow rapidly. Old broadcasting revenue is declining because viewers moved to streaming — and streaming gave Canadian creators access to 8 billion potential viewers instead of 40 million. Canadian culture is not under threat. The CRTC's own numbers say so.

What the levy actually does

If the problem doesn't exist, what does the levy accomplish?

It funds a bureaucratic apparatus. The Canada Media Fund receives the largest share of the 5% base contribution. The CMF has historically reported recoupment rates in the single digits on its investments in Canadian productions — for every dollar invested, pennies come back. Despite billions in CanCon subsidies across all programs, Canadian content accounts for only 36% of peak-hour English-language linear TV viewing. Canadians watch what Canadians want to watch. Bureaucrats haven't changed that in decades of trying.

The levy cross-subsidizes Bell, Rogers, and Corus. Traditional Canadian broadcasters are having their obligations reduced from 30-45% to 25% in the same decision that triples obligations on streamers. Bell — which cut 4,800 positions in February 2024, including hundreds of journalists, sold 45 of its 103 regional radio stations, and then asked the CRTC to eliminate its local news requirements — now receives competitive relief funded by its foreign competitors. The companies that broke their regulatory promises are being rewarded. The companies that voluntarily invested billions are being punished.

The levy empowers the CRTC itself. The commission's budget is approximately 80% funded by fees charged to the industries it regulates — $91.7 million out of $113.5 million in 2025-26. The Online Streaming Act's passage immediately expanded the CRTC's regulatory work, increased fee collection, and justified hiring more staff. A regulator that depends on the regulated for 80% of its funding has an institutional incentive to expand the scope of regulation. That is precisely what it has done — from a 5% levy in June 2024 to 15% less than two years later. The regulatory apparatus feeds itself. And it's getting out of hand.

More pressing, the levy creates trade liability. The CRTC has given the United States a live grievance weeks before the CUSMA review deadline, in an environment where U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum sit at 50%, automobiles at 25%, and the baseline global tariff on non-CUSMA goods is 10%. Canada has limited leverage. The CRTC just handed the other side a new pressure point.

The "enhanced partnerships" requirement is the devil in the details

Buried in the 15% decision is a requirement that will reshape how streamers can spend their money in Canada — and not in the way the CRTC claims.

For platforms earning over $100 million in Canadian revenue, at least 30% of the 10% Canadian Programming Expenditure must go to "enhanced partnerships" — defined as productions where a Canadian entity holds majority copyright. Any shortfall below 30% is redirected to the Canada Media Fund.

This means most of the existing production spending by Netflix, Amazon, and Disney in Canada will not qualify. When Netflix produces a show in Toronto with Canadian crews, Canadian locations, and Canadian actors — but retains global distribution rights and majority copyright as the commissioning platform — that spending does not count toward the enhanced partnerships requirement. The billions already being spent voluntarily are rendered invisible to regulator.

The CRTC has designed a system where the only spending that "counts" is spending where Canadians own the copyright. The practical effect: streamers will restructure their investments on paper, creating minority co-production deals that technically transfer copyright while retaining de facto creative and distribution control. The industry is witnessing the birth of Hollywood North Accounting. But yet, the content won't change. And the productions that genuinely serve Canadian audiences — the shows Netflix greenlit because Canadians would watch them — will be displaced by productions that exist to check a regulatory box.

Geist noted that the CRTC "basically treated the hundreds of millions they spend on production in Canada and the significant promotion of Canadian content around the world as irrelevant" — effectively treating foreign streamers as ATMs while denying them credit for the voluntary investments they've already made.

A regulator built for 1968 regulating 2026

The CRTC was created by the Broadcasting Act of 1968. Its founding rationale rested on two premises: spectrum scarcity and cultural sovereignty.

Spectrum scarcity meant that because radio frequencies are finite, the state must license who can broadcast and impose public-interest obligations on licensees. In 1968, there were a handful of television channels and radio stations. The fear was that American content would overwhelm Canadian voices entirely.

Both premises are dead.

There is no spectrum scarcity on the internet. Anyone can publish. There are over 160,000 Canadian YouTube creators educating and entertaining audiences worldwide — without any CRTC involvement. In fact, more Canadian content is uploaded to YouTube in a single day than Canadian terrestrial television has produced in its entire history. The internet eliminated the bottleneck that justified the regulator's existence. Streaming platforms are not broadcasters. They don't use public airwaves. They don't occupy a scarce frequency. They're software companies delivering content over internet connections that consumers purchase voluntarily. The entire conceptual foundation of broadcasting regulation — that the state must impose obligations because access to distribution is limited — has collapsed. (I look forward to the day when buying a radio station with the grandkids will be a fun weekend educational project for a YouTube video.)

Yet the Online Streaming Act extends the Broadcasting Act's framework to the internet anyway. Bill C-11 brought streaming platforms under the CRTC's jurisdiction by declaring that transmitting content over the internet constitutes "broadcasting" within the meaning of the Act. This is pure scope creep. Nobody could have this fundamental of a misunderstanding of the technological present, could they?

The CRTC can now impose CanCon quotas, financial contributions, discoverability requirements, and registration obligations on platforms earning over $10 million and contribution requirements on those earning over $25 million in Canada.

The regulator designed for a world with twelve TV channels is now regulating a world with twelve million. Former CRTC Vice-Chair Peter Menzies — who spent almost a decade as a commissioner — wrote that the CRTC is "causing real economic harm by setting unprecedented standards for sloth." Eight of eleven decisions under the Online Streaming Act took over eight months. Three took more than a year. The CRTC has been sued at least six times over its decisions.

Menzies described CRTC stakeholders as "privately appalled" but unwilling to "speak ill publicly regarding the regulator's mordant inefficiency." In an earlier piece, he concluded that Canada's once-independent regulator is "now nothing more than an arm of government, subject to the whims of those in power" — taking direction from the Heritage ministry, "which has been heavily influenced by lobbyists for the regulated creators."

Sean Speer, writing in The Hub the following day, concluded that the CRTC "increasingly behaves as though consumer preferences are a market failure to be corrected rather than signals to be respected." His recommendation: abolish the commission entirely. Spectrum licensing and technical regulation can be handled by ISED. What Canada does not need is a "quasi-autonomous cultural bureaucracy with an institutional incentive to continuously expand the scope of regulation." I have come to the same conclusion.

The investment chill

The MPA has not announced withdrawal of operations from Canada. But the language signals a clear cooling.

Rivkin's statement that the decision "will spark even more inflation in the market, making further investment and innovation less attractive" is an investment warning. Netflix argued at CRTC hearings that mandatory levies could "result in displacement of certain investments" — forced contributions to prescribed funds would crowd out voluntary, commercially-driven production spending. In plain language: money that would have gone to productions Canadians want to watch will instead go to productions that satisfy bureaucratic requirements.

Spotify has already raised Canadian prices: the Individual plan rose from CAD $10.99 to $13.99 since 2023 — a 27% increase across two rounds of hikes. Canadian subscribers pay the difference.

The Canadian government has been through this before. In 2024, Ottawa imposed a Digital Services Tax on large technology companies — a 3% levy on revenue earned from Canadian users. The United States objected. In June 2025, the Carney government capitulated. The DST was scrapped under threat of retaliatory tariffs. The White House publicly declared that Canada had "caved." Geist drew the parallel: Canada dismissed warnings about the DST, was forced to reverse course, and is now repeating the pattern with the Online Streaming Act.

The Americans told Canada this was coming. The CRTC did it anyway.

The question no one in Ottawa is asking

Canadian content production doubled over the past decade. Canadian artists rank third in the world on streaming platforms. Ninety-two percent of Canadian music royalties come from international listeners. Netflix has spent $5 billion producing content in Canada voluntarily. The platforms being taxed are the same platforms that made Drake discoverable in Lagos, made The Weeknd a phenomenon in Seoul, and made Schitt's Creek a global hit.

The CRTC's response to this flourishing is to levy a crushing 15% tax on the platforms responsible for it — higher than any comparable jurisdiction except France — while reducing obligations on Canadian incumbents that just gutted their newsrooms and broke their CanCon covenants.

The courts will decide whether the CRTC has the legal authority to impose this levy. But why? Why triple a levy to protect an industry that is demonstrably thriving? Why provoke a trade dispute weeks before the CUSMA review? Why tax the companies that actually invest in Canadian production while cutting slack for the companies that exploit Canadian production promises to win regulatory approval and then renege?

The CRTC was built for 1968. It regulates as if man never landed on the moon. The internet did not eliminate the need for Canadian stories — it made Canadian stories globally accessible for the first time in history (beyond Just For Laughs Gags — I see that everywhere). The proper response to that revolution was gratitude and adaptation. The CRTC's response was to claim jurisdiction over it and kill it with taxes.

Peter Menzies suggested that Canada should sacrifice the Online Streaming Act in the CUSMA negotiations to preserve supply management and other trade interests. Given the trajectory — a live legal challenge, a U.S. Congressional bill threatening retaliation, an ambassador publicly condemning the decision, and a Heritage Minister conspicuously distancing himself from the outcome — Canada will almost certainly have to surrender the Act at the negotiating table. Was that the point?

The CRTC picked this fight. The government created the law that enabled it, then pretended to be surprised by the result. Canadian creators will not benefit from a trade war with the platforms that made them globally successful. The only beneficiary is the regulator itself — an institution born in 1968, funded 80% by industry fees, staffed by former industry lobbyists, and now demanding 15% of the revenues generated by companies that did more for Canadian culture in a decade than the CRTC managed in sixty years.

Canadians would be better off without the CRTC.

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